Moving on from Rails • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving on from Rails

#51

Post by dextorious » Wed, Nov 30, 2011, 7:07 PM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #49

dextorious wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them.""" You've seen Facebook's codebase? I doubt it. And when you show me a blogging platform more successful than Wordpress, then we will talk. Who exactly despises FB, Wikipedia or Wordpress? Not the users. And while I can't talk about Wikipedia and FB (haven't seen the source), neither do Wordpress developers (i…

Facebook, Aditya Agarwal, presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Facebook-Software-Stack Judge for yourself (you probably have to interpret what he said there since obviously he doesn't say up-front "it sucks" but the words he chose describe the situation). Maybe despise is a strong word. But what's your point? successful project so they must have good codebase or something? My original post was that "those…

"""But what's your point? successful project so they must have good codebase or something?"""

I never implied that "because they are successful, they must have a good codebase". I actually made a different point, essentially asking in return:

What's a "good code base"?

Wordpress's, for example, is good at what it does, not in some idealistic theoretical way. Not only it resulted in a successful product (actually two: wordpress + wordpress.com), but it also has been proven stable (heard often of WP crashing mysteriously for any other reason that too much load and no caching which is totally reasonable?) and flexible to build upon (wordpress constantly adds features to its core and tons of developers add third-party add-ons).

I'd argue that "good" code base = flexible, extensible, successful, liked by IT'S developers. WP has had all of those. So, for THEIR PURPOSES and to THEIR DEVS, it is a good codebase.

On the other hand you implied that FB, WP, Wiki's code is bad. I tried to show that WP's at least is far from bad by MANY metrics. What are your metrics? Besides, say, proof by rigorous handwaving?

As for the FB presentation, he never says despise or sucks, as you mention. It's a classic presentation of some trade-offs. You'd have a selection of those even if you coded in Haskell or whatever.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#52

Post by ScottBurson » Wed, Nov 30, 2011, 7:37 PM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #40

jwblackwell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defence of PHP: Firstly, every time I see it getting slammed its nearly ALWAYS PHP in comparison to a framework whether it's rails, django, web2py or whatever. As soon as I see this I can't help but feel the author is just jumping on the "PHP isn't cool bandwagon". PHP isn't a framework, so don't compare it to other frameworks. Secondly, it is possible to write good code using PHP - and many people do. It powers s…

I'm not sure you should put "write good code using PHP" in the same paragraph with "some of the largest site in the world". Because they're the exact opposite. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them. PS: for the downvoters, why the hate? it's the fact though. I'm not saying you cannot write good code in PHP. What I'm trying to say is that "big sites ou…

A friend of mine recently left Yahoo in no small part because he hated working on their PHP codebase.

I don't know about the other sites you name, but if you had mentioned Yahoo you would definitely have had a point.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#53

Post by xiaoma » Wed, Nov 30, 2011, 8:24 PM UTC

xd wrote: post #46

xiaoma wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What flaws are these? Have you ever seen this piece? http://tnx.nl/php.html Some of the issues mentioned have been dealt with in PHP5 but a lot of the problems will probably be there permanently, such as inconsistent function names, arguments and return values mentioned at the top of the piece. That isn't an insult to people using PHP. Much like I sometimes say that soda sucks without implying that soda drinkers su…

When you insult something that is part of ones persona, you are insulting that person. Soda is an awful thing to compare to something that someone has spent a decade of their life expressing themselves with.

If all of what you've written is in earnest, then you've just insulted many soda lovers.

That said, the solution isn't to walk on eggshells around every topic that anyone could possibly have identified with. The solution is to be very, very cautious about making anything so much a part of one's persona that a stranger's critique of that thing feels personal.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#54

Post by bphogan » Thu, Dec 01, 2011, 3:38 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #20

bphogan wrote: post #4

This is less about moving on from Rails and more about moving on from building static pages from a database. Lots of web folks have been predicting this. I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views and do something pretty awesome. And then it becomes a question as to what Rails…

> I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. No, there are clear use cases either way. On one hand you have documents, on the other you have multi-platform apps. For the former (which still vastly outnumbers the latter BTW), serving HTML from the server is the obvious choice, for the latter, a REST API is the obvious choice. There is a large g…

Sorry, what I meant about serving HTML from the server was the construction of HTML documents using server-side code. There will always be static pages served with apache or whatnot :)